Bundy paused, testing their reaction. The Kennedy brothers were intelligent, courageous men. True, they were a bit arrogant, and too self-certain and self-satisfied for Bundy’s taste. But they respected his judgment, and knew he would not waste their time unless he thought the idea worth trying.
Finally, the President smiled. “Ike has never really liked me that much. He didn’t like my tax cuts, and he’s worried I’m spending too much on defense. But I’ll tell you something. After the Bay of Pigs went south, I asked him to come down to Camp David for a talk. Sent the helicopter. We spent a couple of hours together.” The rocking slowed, then picked up again. “We talked about what went wrong. He said I should have given the invasion air cover. I said I was worried about everybody knowing it was us. Ike laughed. He told me the invasion force had boats, weapons, radios—where else would they have gotten all that? He said it’s impossible for the United States to hide its hand in the world. Whatever we do, everybody will always know it’s us. And then he gave me some advice. He said, never go into battle unless we plan to do whatever is necessary to win.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“And you think this woman—this GREENHILL—can help us win?”
“I do, sir. But it’s going to be tricky. If word leaks out, the Soviets will run for cover and the back channel will shut down. We’ll have to exclude the ExComm.”
The attorney general was flabbergasted. “Why would we do that?”
Still Bundy kept his solemn gaze on the President. “Sir, I am going to make a proposal. It won’t be in writing. Nothing will be in writing. I would like to run an operation involving three principals, and nobody in the White House, aside from the three of us and the director of the Secret Service, will be aware of what is going on.”
The attorney general started to ask what the operation was, but his older brother got in the first question: “Who are the principals?”
“One, a Soviet intelligence officer,” said Bundy. “Two, a college student.”
“Who’s the third?”
“You, sir. You’d have to be part of the operation for it to work.”
Kennedy stopped rocking. “In case you’ve forgotten, Mac, I’m the President of the United States—”
“Yes, sir. And that’s why only you can do it.”
“What exactly would I have to do?”
“Provide ample grounds for Washington rumor, sir. Unflattering rumor, I’m afraid. Your reputation will be hurt, but the country will be saved.”
The Kennedy brothers exchanged a wary glance. It was the attorney general who said, curtly: “I think you’d better explain that.”
Bundy never cracked a smile. “Well, for one thing, I understand she’s a real beauty.”
“Who is?”
“GREENHILL.”
THIRTY
Washington Rumor
I
The two women shared a late breakfast, in the course of which Harrington asked Margo about her hopes and her dreams and her young man, and kept the conversation carefully clear of Varna and Fomin and the missiles in Cuba. Afterward, they went for a walk along narrow Georgetown streets while Ainsley trailed a block behind, watching for surveillance. At three-thirty in the afternoon, a car called for her, a dark Ford that practically screamed official business. The driver’s name was Warren. He was brown-haired and broad-shouldered and sported a crew cut and an ill-fitting suit, and even if his identification, demanded by Harrington, had not said “Secret Service,” Margo suspected that she would have recognized him a mile away.
“We won’t speak again, dear,” said Harrington on the front step.
“I understand.”
“You’ll do fine.”
“I’ll do my best,” Margo said, and felt somehow that her answer had let Harrington down.
Sitting in the back as the dark sedan sailed through the Saturday traffic, Margo was at once nervous and proud. This was it. She had what she wanted. Harrington had warned her back in September that being on the inside could be an addiction, and Margo understood entirely, because the rush that had her trembling was anticipation, not fear. Her body felt loose and hot, her clothes scraped uncomfortably against her skin, and she supposed this is what it must feel like when you’re sneaking off to meet your lover.
She was righter than she knew.
II
Warren drove swiftly across town. Twice she asked where they were going. Twice he answered with boyish diffidence that they were almost there. Finally, he pulled up outside an aging apartment building on Columbia Road, just off Sixteenth Street. Warren parked on a side street and, holding the door, directed her to what looked like the service entrance.
“Just ring the bell, miss. Oh, and don’t forget your bag.”
The man who answered might have been Warren’s twin, in affect if not in appearance, for he, too, was tall and crew-cut, although his hair was black to Warren’s brown, and Margo guessed he was somebody’s bodyguard even before he had her remove her hood and then held up a photograph, comparing the likeness. He stepped aside and invited her in, but never offered to take her bag, she supposed to leave his hands free in case she pulled a weapon.
“Please, follow me,” he said, his voice surprisingly soft in a man so obviously tough. He led the way along a narrow corridor. The walls were sagging with damp. At the back of the apartment, he knocked at a door, opened it, waved her through, shut it from the outside.
The man waiting inside was small and professorial, right down to the regulation tweeds. The steel frames of his spectacles glistened. His eyes were very dark, and very serious.
“My name is McGeorge Bundy,” he said, taking the bag from her hand and setting it aside. He seemed distant and distracted. Behind the polished lenses, his sharp eyes flashed with the anger of unresolved tragedy, like a man who had just lost a relative and wondered whether you were to blame. “I work at the White House. I am special assistant to the President for national security affairs.”
A larger stage indeed.
“I’ve seen you on television,” Margo said, and immediately felt like an idiot.
But Bundy was in any case not a man for small talk. “We have very little time, Miss Jensen. I’m going to explain what happens next, and then, God willing, you’re never going to see me again.”
Steam gurgled behind a wall. Clothes, tools, and empty beer bottles competed for floor space. She suspected that the building super lived here, when the President’s national security adviser wasn’t borrowing the place.
For half an hour, he laid out the scheme—she would have a cover job at the Labor Department, housing had been secured for her—and then he explained the procedure for arranging her meetings with Kennedy.
“I’ll be meeting him personally?” she asked, very surprised.
“That seems to be what Fomin expects. He doesn’t want intermediaries. He sounds ready to see conspiracies everywhere. The only way to reassure him is if you carry messages directly to and from the President.”
“I’m just going to walk into the Oval Office and meet the President?”
“Not exactly. We’ll get to those details in a moment.”
There was more to the briefing—contact numbers, addresses—and then Bundy apologized handsomely for drawing her into the middle of this. But he kept looking at his watch, and she wondered what he was late for.
“That covers it, Miss Jensen. Any questions?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Please.”
“I’ve been asking, but nobody will tell me what happened to Agatha. Agatha Milner. She was with me in Varna—”
“We’re not discussing Varna,” he said firmly. “Next.”
The swiftness and finality of this dismissal left her momentarily dizzy. As simple as that, Bundy was able to conjure Agatha into the ether.
“How long will I be in Washington?”
“Until the crisis is over, or until we persuade Fomin to deal with us directly. And that last is unlikely, I might add.
Next.”
“Are the missiles a real threat? They really could hit Washington and New York, like the press is saying?”
“Yes. Next.”
“You said we’d come back to how I’m going to meet the President.”
“Yes. Well, this is where the plan gets complicated.” As if the rest were not. “Let me explain the cover story.”
He did. And as she listened, her fists clenched with anger and her eyes grew wide with dread.
PART III
Prisoner’s Dilemma
October 23, 1962–October 29, 1962
Washington, D.C.
THIRTY-ONE
Ground Zero
I
On Tuesday, October 23, just past seven in the evening, Margo Jensen stood in a bleak urban rain waiting miserably for the D.C. Transit bus. The stop was on Fourth Street in Southwest Washington, just north of G. Her red Cornell umbrella shielded her from the downpour but not from the autumn night that chilled her bones; although the weather was not the cause of her trembling. Twenty-four hours ago, President Kennedy had told the nation that the Soviet Union had placed missiles with nuclear warheads in Cuba. Now Margo was off to her first meeting with Aleksandr Fomin, to help Kennedy and Khrushchev figure out what to do about them.
Margo cupped a hand above her eyes, peering into the downpour in search of the bus. Earlier today, as she crossed the street after work, a skidding car had nearly run her down; her nerves were so stretched that she had caught herself wondering whether the driver might have been trying to hit her. Everybody in the city seemed jangly. In her apartment building after Kennedy’s speech last night, people were thronging the hallways, arguing and shouting, talking about where they were from, and where they had friends, and where they intended to go with their families once the station wagon was packed. The two propositions on which they all agreed were that Washington, D.C., was Ground Zero, and that Ground Zero might not be the best place to be.
Margo had watched the President’s address with the two roommates she had met only Saturday night, when she moved in. Hope and Patsy were interns in dull federal departments, just as Margo herself was: for her cover work was in an obscure corner in the Labor Department, in the office of a woman named Torie Elden, principal deputy to the functionary charged with calculating unemployment numbers each month. Torie was in her thirties, and unmarried, and what was known at this time as a woman of speed. She was also, via the tentacular relations of the old Negro families, a distant cousin, a key factor in the selection of her office as Margo’s destination, for the fiction at every point had to be plausible. Anyone dogging her steps would suppose that Margo, exhausted and distracted following the events in Bulgaria, had chosen to take a leave of absence from school, opting instead to use family connections to gain an instant, and fairly easy, internship deep in the labyrinth of federal bureaucracy. And if Torie persisted in giving her peculiar looks all through that first morning, as she explained which reports went into which folders and when, there was behind the surface fiction a second fiction that, through the operation of the Washington rumor mill, would soon provide the indelicate explanation for the sudden White House command that Torie find her cousin a place.
Margo dutifully took notes, and spent the rest of Monday filing and fetching (as Nana huffily referred to secretarial work), all the while waiting for the promised contact. Fomin had not said how he would get in touch with her, but the vanished Niemeyer had assured her that the Soviet spy would figure it out. At her briefing on Saturday, Mr. Bundy had said much the same.
“How will he know where to find me?”
“He’ll know.”
As for Hope and Patsy, they were madly curious about her but had evidently been warned not to ask too many questions. Dark-haired Hope was a Midwesterner, quiet and studious; blond Patsy, a loud, rangy Californian. But the oddest part was that when she arrived they said they had been expecting her since Friday.
You are going to be playing on a much larger stage now, Harrington had said. The people who will run the operation will likely be from the very top.
That much Margo understood. It explained why they had cut off her access to the State Department, and why Niemeyer had done his vanishing act. But, the more she pondered, the more the chain of events escaped her. Fomin had visited her on Tuesday. Niemeyer had disappeared on Wednesday. Her emergency codes had been cut off on Thursday, and Torie Elden had evidently been contacted on Friday morning.
Yet her reunion with Harrington had not come until Friday night.
What was going on?
II
She was on the bus now, headed north on Fourth Street. Every few blocks, the bus bumped over the tracks of the city’s vanished streetcars. The apartment they’d found for her was in a development of townhouses and residential towers known popularly as “the new Southwest.” In the morning, the bus would have been crowded with bureaucrats heading to work, but this time of night, the clientele was harder, and darker, and angrier. As the bus crossed the Mall, the Capitol dome shimmered murkily through the night rain. Soon she was passing thickly clustered federal office buildings. Gazing out the window, she remembered yesterday morning’s briefing by a highly curious Torie Elden, who was busily trying to figure out why she had a second intern, even though the budget provided for just one.
“Either you know somebody or you are somebody,” Torie had murmured in genuine admiration. “Your application never even got to my desk.”
“It was a last-minute thing,” said Margo, lamely, because the briefing had not covered that particularly detail.
“My boss told me not to ask too many questions.”
“That’s probably a good idea.”
“We don’t really have an office for you. You’ll have to sit in the file room. It doesn’t have a window.” Striking a saucy pose, hand on ample hip. “Does that meet your approval? Or are you going to complain to somebody who’ll call up my boss and make him give you my office instead?”
“Of course not,” said Margo, blushing. The briefing hadn’t covered that issue, either.
An awkward pause. “I thought your side of the family was all Republicans.”
“I’m a Democrat.”
“You’re not even old enough to vote.”
“I’m old enough to serve my country.”
Torie laughed. “Margo, honey, you’ll be working as a file clerk. If you want to call that serving your country, that’s up to you. But there are people out there who risk their lives. Don’t put yourself in their category.”
“No, ma’am. I won’t.”
III
The Labor Department was housed in a granite monstrosity, occupying two blocks north of Constitution Avenue, fronting on Fourteenth Street. Its somber gray walls were decorated with enough pillars and pilasters for half a dozen government buildings of more ordinary dimensions. It was constructed in the 1930s, an era when size and elaboration were often mistaken for importance.
On Tuesday, Margo lunched with a brace of fellow interns: the one who worked for Torie, and four or five others from around her floor. The group had taken the newcomer to the basement cafeteria, to lay out what they called the rules of the road. The linoleum was colorless with age. The vast room smelled vaguely of cat. As Margo struggled with her overdone chicken breast, they peppered her with advice: Never let Mr. Baldwin get you alone in his office, or anywhere else. Don’t talk about civil rights. And don’t mind what anybody says about you: They’re just jealous.
Jealous of what? Margo asked.
“Of your obvious friends in high places,” they said, scarcely bothering to hide their snickers.
Margo didn’t know where to put her eyes. “It’s just that Miss Elden is my cousin,” she said, but this wasn’t enough to get her off the hook.
As they crossed the room to bus their trays, an older man bumped into her, spilling his tray but, oddly, not hers. As he crouched to pick up his food, she heard his papery voice close to her ear. “Yenching Palace. Tonight
. Eight. Alone.”
She might have ignored him, or even assumed that she’d misunderstood him, except that the last time she saw him he was wearing a Cornell hat and snapping her picture.
All of which explained how Margo had come to be riding the bus through the chilly night rain, wishing Mother Nature hated her a little less.
IV
Margo stepped off the bus at last, on Connecticut Avenue at Macomb Street. The public library was directly across the street. The Yenching Palace, a Chinese restaurant, was two blocks north of the library. She wanted the two blocks, hoping the walk might calm her. The neighborhood was called Cleveland Park, and Margo knew it well. During high school, she had spent a couple of weeks in Cleveland Park each summer, because one of her white girlfriends was the daughter of a congressman who had houses both here and in Westchester County. Margo wondered whether Fomin, in choosing the restaurant, was aware of her familiarity, and decided arbitrarily that he must have been.
Trudging north, leaning into the wind, Margo cinched her coat more tightly around her neck. The umbrella was inside out and useless. She felt the same way. Instincts honed over the past month led her eyes into alleys and doorways, but she didn’t know what she was looking for. Bundy had told her that no American agencies would have surveillance on her. Margo wasn’t sure whether to believe him; or, for that matter, whether he meant his words in warning or reassurance.
Connecticut Avenue in this part of the city was nearly all commercial, but the leafy lanes crisscrossing it were filled with the large, elegant homes of the city’s well-to-do. No Negroes lived in Cleveland Park. She wondered how long that change would be in coming. Both Congress and the White House were in the hands of the Democratic Party, but the chances of passing an open-housing law were near zero. These were the pressing matters on which Margo Jensen focused as she continued across Newark Street. She was determined to think about anything except what was really happening: Kennedy’s speech, and her own role in preventing what the people thronging the hallway of her building were worried would happen next. The dream was now the reality.
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